Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Loose lips sink ships is an American English idiom meaning "beware of unguarded talk". The phrase originated on propaganda posters during World War II, with the earliest version using the wording loose lips might sink ships. [3] The phrase was created by the War Advertising Council [4] and used on posters by the United States Office of War ...
Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states: [1]. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It is a philosophical razor that suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior.
The exact meaning of the scare quotes is not clear without further context. The term scare quotes may be confusing because of the word scare. An author may use scare quotes not to convey alarm, but to signal a semantic quibble. Scare quotes may suggest or create a problematization with the words set in quotes. [25] [26]
The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective–noun combination of two words, but they can also be devised in the meaning of sentences or phrases. One classic example of the use of oxymorons in English literature can be found in this example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo strings together thirteen in a row: [11]
Christopher Hitchens was an English American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. His new Ten Commandments are: [12] [13] Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their color. Do not ever even think of using people as private property, or as owned, or as slaves.
PALMER LAKE, Colo. — Every day, retired Army veteran Donald Simmons must make a decision: pay $5 to shower at the nearest truck stop or risk taking a shower at home in contaminated water.
Because standard English does not have negative concord but many varieties and registers of English do, and because most English speakers can speak or comprehend across varieties and registers, double negatives as collocations are functionally auto-antonymic (contranymic) in English; for example, a collocation such as "ain't nothin" or "not ...
Lorenzen's use of the simile of the raft was a kind of foundationalist modification of Neurath's original, disagreeing with Neurath by asserting that it is possible to jump into the water and to build a new raft while swimming, i.e., to "start from scratch" to build a new system of knowledge.